🧪The Science of Procrastination

Do you often find yourself procrastinating?

Are you always telling yourself that you’ll ‘do it tomorrow’?

Well, you need to stop this right now - because this habit will accumulate and lead to poor grades!

In todays post, I’ll go over the science of procrastination and why you procrastinate, which will help you understand how to remove it. In next weeks post, I will reveal how to prevent and cure procrastination for good!

💪 Let’s do this

(don’t procrastinate reading this lol)

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Table of Contents

• What is Procrastination?

• Understanding Dopamine (crucial step!)

  • How does dopamine relate to procrastination?

• The Only 4 Things that Matter (apart from the dopa …

• The Cure to Procrastination

• It’s Your Choice…

• 🥳 Special Announcement…

• ✅ Action Steps:

What is Procrastination?

Now, let’s actually delve deeper into how this habit arises.

Procrastination is usually a feeling of low motivation - you know you need to complete that task, but you’re just not motivated or bothered to do it. This low motivated feeling comes from a crash or reduction below baseline of dopamine levels:

Understanding Dopamine (crucial step!)

Dopamine is a hormone that contributes to many things: reward/pleasure, motivation & reinforcement, mood regulation, etc.

Something that gives you dopamine will give you a stimulus to keep chasing that thing which as a result will make you want to do it even more.

How does dopamine relate to procrastination?

When you complete a highly pleasurable activity — cough cough, scrolling on your phone for 5 hours straight! - you gain a huge dopamine spike (this provides you with a pleasurable feeling). However, because of this huge dopamine spike, the crash after it is also huge - the steeper the rise, the steeper the fall!

When your dopamine levels fall below baseline (refer to the above graph), it leads to dopamine deficit. This deficit is what leads to that ‘I don’t feel like doing anything’ feeling.

Next week, I’ll explain how to control this source of dopamine so you don’t have that crash and hence prevent procrastination.

But just a hint:

• GET OFF THAT PHONE!!!!

• STOP PLAYING THAT GAME!!!

If you want to do these things, do so after your productive work.

The Only 4 Things that Matter (apart from the dopamine)

Although dopamine is the cause of low motivation, sometimes - despite feeling productive - you may still procrastinate.

Why is this the case?

It’s because of these four factors:

1. Importance

2. Urgency

3. Fear

4. Uncertainty

When you have a:

• Reduced Importance — you don’t see how the task you need to complete is important for your success

• Reduced Urgency — the task you need to finish isn’t that urgent.

• Increased Fear — you’re scared of the task due to its complexity, difficulty, etc.

• Increased Uncertainty — you’re not sure what to do exactly. You’re confused.

relating to the task you need to complete, you are going to procrastinate!

Let me give you a quick example:

Let’s say you need to complete a past paper exam. If you don’t see why it’s important to start doing practice questions now, then you’ll be less likely to do it. Furthermore, if you also feel that doing these practice questions aren’t urgent (since your exams are far away), that’s another reason as to not complete it.

If you are fearful of these practice questions because of difficulty of topics, how unprepared you feel or how well you will do, then that’s another reason to delay the task.

Finally, if you’re unsure of how to go about doing these practice questions, for example, whether you should do it timed or untimed, today or tomorrow, with notes or without, etc, you’re going to be confused and thus procrastinate further.

I want you to think for a minute: When you procrastinate, does the task you’re delaying fit into the categories above?

The Cure to Procrastination

In order to cure procrastination, we need to:

• Increase Importance — clearly understand how the task we need to do is important for our future success

• Increase Urgency — make the task urgent for us.

• Reduce Fear — not be afraid of the task

• Reduce Uncertainty - clearly understand exactly what we need to do for that task/study session.

How do you increase and decrease these factors?

That’s what I’ll go through next week!

It’s Your Choice…

You have to understand that your procrastination is completely your fault.

This may feel confronting, but you need to understand this so that you can finally change.

Whether you decide to delay your tasks or not delay it, at the end of the day, you’re the one who is going to be affected.

Remember this for next time!

Are you really going to let procrastination stop you from achieving greatness?

You better not!

Procrastination has got you down on the fall and it’s looking over to the crowd (your haters, doubters and negative people) screaming

Hahaha, look how weak this student is!

Are you prove procrastination to be right?

No you’re not.

Get back up and fight!

🥳 Special Announcement…

Back in year 11 when I decided to change my entire life and make an academic comeback,

I struggled. I struggled a lot.

Why did I struggle?

Because I had no idea what I needed to do to succeed.

What are the steps I need to take to go from D’s to A’s?

What did I need to do to go from average to 95+ ATAR?

I used to always search this stuff up on YouTube, but everytime I did, I either got:

1. No results, or

2. Someone telling me what to do but not actually showing me what to do!

And through trial and error, setback after setback…

I ended up figuring it all out.

And guess what?

You don’t need to go through what I went through.

You don’t need to make the same mistakes I made.

I am going to be releasing the greatest course on how to achieve your desired ATAR, regardless of your circumstances.

I will be revealing to you my exact blueprint that I used to go from low-performing to achieving this:

• DUX of year 12

• 97.90 ATAR

• Band 6 (90-100/100) in all subjects

• Scholarship to study at UNSW

Making an academic comeback & scoring a 95+ ATAR is just like playing a video game.

Imagine playing a video game without the map it gives you.

How much harder would it be to finish successfully?

Now, what if you had a map to follow for your studies? How much easier would it be to succeed?

Well, I will be giving you this map!

Welcome to:

DUX Academy will give you EVERYTHING you need to achieve a ANY ATAR you want — regardless of your current grades, school or chosen subjects.

Here’s what’s to come:

• ✅ Ultimate Guide to a 95+ ATAR Course that will transform you from D-student to A-student — has 8 modules teaching you everything (Normally $899)

  

  The study module especially will result in you NEVER having to ask ‘how do I study’ again

• ✅ Progress Tracking, Personalised support and feedback (Normally $997)

• ✅ Daily 1 hour study with me sessions - yes, we’ll jump on a call together and study everyday! (Normally $1680)

• ✅ Daily Accountability (Normally $997)

• ✅ Exclusive high-performing Notion Templates (Normally $99)

• ✅ Exclusive high-performing checklists to ensure correct actions are taken (Normally $70)

• ✅ Subject-specific guides (Normally $149)

• ✅ 2X Q&A Calls Per Week and Weekly Group Coaching (Normally $1497)

Oh, you think that’s good?

Here are some additional bonuses:

• ✅ Peak Productivity Masterclass (Normally $399)

• ✅ Premium Skool ATAR Community (Priceless)

DUX Academy has a total value of $6,777

But guess how much I will be giving it to you for?

$40/month!

For the first 50 members, the price will be $40/month.

Then, for the next 50, it’ll be $60/month.

And it will just keep on increasing…

Early Access to DUX Academy is set to be released THIS FRIDAY (write this down now and set a reminder!)

Make sure you do not miss out on this opportunity - the opportunity to pay $40/month while everyone else pays double!

There’s also a 100% 7-day money-back guarantee (no questions asked) - so there’s so much to gain, and nothing to lose.

DUX Academy will be the GREATEST INVESTMENT you ever make, and it’s something that I wish I had when I was in year 11 and 12.

I look forward to accelerating your academic comeback and proving those who doubt you wrong 💪 

✅ Action Steps:

1. Join the DUX Club to make sure you’re among the first 50 members for DUX Academy

2. Set a reminder for Friday (when early access is released)

3. Get off your phone and stop scrolling for 8 hours straight

See you next week, future DUX 🫡